I hate to ruin the yokels, but do atheists tell everyone there atheists? I’ve never felt like its something I’ve been able to say out loud in public, due to overwhelming public pressure otherwise. but I’m very very active in private and in writing(lol no one reads my writing). Is this a common thing?

Some do, I generally don't. Took 5 years at my workplace, despite me not shying away from political or religious discussions. It took someone using religion as the sole defense of something for it to come out.

Not in my experience, but also it seems like some atheists have a hard time not saying something when someone says something about god. Kind of a chicken and the egg though, where people ignore that the theist was being socially unacceptable first by bringing religion up.

This. As an atheist I only reveal this when someone is trying to push a policy position that is supported by "God" or if someone asked my religion
I know some people would rather atheists would be quiet. Like being gay once folk see that regular people are gay and not monsters the same applies to atheists

I get confused by that as well. I have random conversations with people I see regularly and they’ll talk about getting a clean bill of health or something and wave their hands and say “thank you jesus” while looking up to “heaven”. Lol. Last weekend I grocery shopped at 2 different stores, ended up with 3 Christian fliers under my windshield. This week I received a mailer from a local baptist church. We have a Christian radio station piped into stores and their stickers are on all the bad drivers cars. Plus the billboards and mega churches every half mile.

I don’t know any fellow atheists other than family and I sure as hell don’t tell anyone I’m not very close to because the hyper Christians here are damn crazy. I like to keep life simple.

This is a misunderstanding about what is happening with the hormone. It primes your brain for sleep and regulates your sleep cycle as it occurs. You'll be more likely to stay asleep once you are out and have a more regulated sleep while you're under.

The pill itself does not actually make you fall asleep. It just readies your brain for sleep if you take it a half hour before laying down.

I've found it makes me sleepy but I can fight through it if I'm doing something like watching TV. I need to get myself in the mindset to sleep right after I take it. It's not like some prescription drugs where they say you should literally be seated on your bed before you take it.

That's so scary. Thankfully I don't ever drive when I take it. I never leave my bed actually. I do however love to do some online Ambien shopping. I get random little things in the mail all the time with no recollection of ordering them. The most recent one was a bandana for my dog that said "Alpha Bitch" on it.

I never took trazodone, but I did take Melatonin when college started getting really hectic for me.

I remember before I started taking Melatonin I would rarely every have a dream, and when I did have a dream it was so lucid, that I'd consider it a rare moment in my life.

After I started taking melatonin I started having lucid dreams like crazy.

A couple weeks ago I had this dream where I was a girl, I'm a guy, and I'm chilling on this ice planet withi a yeti. Fast forward in time and I'm exploring this other planet, kinda like the lower levels of courscant. I keep running into people and they keep acting like I know them, I eventually come to the conclusion that I have amnesia and that I have to figure out who I was.

Near the end of my dream I find out I'm a clone and that the people that I run into that were acting like they knew me were actually people that met my previous iterations.

Now Traz will fuck you up. It makes you retain urine and knocks you out. I used to wake up drier than a mummy on that stuff. It was originally an anti-depressant that sucked so bad, they can really only use it as sleep meds now.

For a while I would frequently overestimate just how much time I had to get to bed before it kicked in, which meant I'd wake up on the couch many mornings with the TV still on, and arms and legs that felt like they were made of lead.

Shit actually scared me the second time I took it. You're supposed to take it on a full stomach. First night I took it yeah it worked pretty well and I got sleepy while I was getting ready for bed and was able to climb into bed and go to sleep. The second time I took it I didn't eat much for whatever reason that night and I almost passed out and died on my way down the stairs for my pre-bed piss.

I literally felt like how the movies portray being roofied. Like I was fucking struggling and ended up passed out on the couch because those stairs were Everest to me.

10/10 would recommend.

Sadly months later they're not as fun as I'm posting this at like almost 4am because I can't sleep despite taking one earlier.

I think it has something to do with it being a natural chemical your body already makes. Your body stops producing it when light hits your eyes so you're basically faking early morning sunshine with the TV. That's why it is generally advised not to watch tv/use computer right before bed. It's like going from a bright sunny day directly to night according to your internal chemistry. Your body can't really adjust that quick. So when you're watching TV after the melatonin you took kicks in your body is saying "nope I don't care if there is extra sleepy stuff here, it's day time still, gotta stay awake!" and it will work to counteract it.

I wouldnt consider melatonin anywhere near as powerful as benadryl or hypnotics like zolpidem or eszopiclone, it does put you to sleep faster than a placebo under very certain circumstances. Jet lag for example. It jumpstarts the sleep wake cycle. It is very safe and its effects are very mild. Overdoses are known to cause vivid dreams. It is sold as a dietary suppliment. I really wouldnt consider this to really be in the same ballpark as "slipping someone drugs"

This is what it does for our kid. She has ADHD and settling at bedtime was a nightmare. Before she even went on meds for the impulsivity, both docs suggested melatonin. She takes it a half hour before her bedtime routine, and it works like a charm, even at 1/3-1/3 the dose she should have for her weight.

Our kid has other underlying issues, but after we started giving her half a melatonin (prescribed by doctor) before sleep, the time it takes to get her to fall fell from 1-1,5 hours to "put her to bed and leave a crack in the door". Sometimes she talks and giggles for 10-15 minutes but its silence soon after. Feels like a weight off our shoulders (and her tiny ones).

So the body uses fractions of mg doses for sleep regulation. You're taking an obscene amount if you are using 3mg doses. The studies which found them beneficial were using micro doses smaller than 1mg.

So MIT patented the dosages of 0.3mg. There is a weird loophole in the laws where because melatonin is a naturally occurring hormone, you can still sell it outside of those doses and not be violating patent laws.

In this case, the 3mg/5mg/10mg standards are outside of MIT's patent. This is why stores typically sell melatonin in these dosages.

Hell I'd be upset (though I do understand how difficult it is to care for kids) if she left them for 10 minutes to run out for milk. Hours at a time is hugely dangerous. Anything could happen. If you run choose to run a home daycare, you've definitely chosen the thug life. So be an OG and do the work.

Look at her jail behaviour after arrest... she's a born con artist with little conscience.

One kid who "fell off of a chair" had injuries consistent with shaken baby syndrome. She was abusing 12 toddlers - drugging them, shaking them, leaving them alone for hours at a time so she could go get a tan.

I don't think she left a very good impression on the judge. I'm surprised she didn't get more time.

Most forms of murder don't involve defenseless kids being killed by the person parents pay and trust to take care of said kid. I was thinking 21 years was a lot until I saw the toddler who "fell" that had symptoms consistent with shaken baby syndrome. Shaking one baby 1 time (as the trusted caregiver) and 21 years sounds good to me.

She's a straight up sociopath. Zero conscious. She will say and do anything to get what ever she wanted.

She arranged the house they were living in. The other roommates paid her.

It was a nice big place, but since it was during the crash the owners were getting foreclosed on. Bend was one of the more hard hit places in 2008. My house went from being valued at $425k to $160k in 2 years. All the bills that she collected, she just kept. She also neglected to tell the other roommates that the house was about to be foreclosed on. So they had to move out with less than a weeks notice, and when she packed up, she stole random shit from the other roommates.

The girl I was dating had a kid, I had a spare cell phone and line, so I gave it to the kid.

The kid lost it as kids do, but he didn't actually lose it. She stole it and was using it for months. I found out when I finally looked at the bill and saw all the minutes, texts and data being used. (it was free for me, so I never looked at it). I swapped the line to a different phone, then I get a call from the account manager for the service and asked why someone was calling in pretending to own the phone and line that wasn't me.

That's right, when the phone she stole stopped working, she called the carrier and asked for it to be turned on.

I've never once met someone so self-centered and truly a sociopath. This story is 100% believable after being around her for a few months. Don't get me started on the puppy she got but left it in a crate 12+ hours a day...

What a small town Bend is or a small world reddit is, I know her too. My mom worked with her at a dry cleaners in Bend, I never heard much besides the frequent "January got yelled at for being coked up at work" or "January was so drunk at work, customers smelled it from the front when she was in the back" or just straight up "January did meth in the bathroom and got fired". But she always kept her job. The owner was a extremely nice older lady, so I can see why.

Since her arrest last March, Neatherlin had approached other inmates and asked them to claim they had worked for her. She also wrote letters to former inmates asking for bail money and promised to pay them from offshore accounts worth "a lot of money," according to the sentencing memo.

Neatherlin's rap sheet dates back to 2007, when she was charged with multiple instances of theft and identity theft. Court documents filed by the state describe her as having an "on-going, systematic scheme of doing what she wanted and getting what she wanted, without any concern for the danger she was placing others in."

Its amazing she seemed to be getting away with being like that for so long.

Not exactly an easy personality to retire on. Im surprised she didnt use the kids to nab a rich guy.

She had also lied to parents about being a registered nurse, even though she had no such qualifications.

Since her arrest last March, Neatherlin had approached other inmates and asked them to claim they had worked for her. She also wrote letters to former inmates asking for bail money and promised to pay them from offshore accounts worth "a lot of money," according to the sentencing memo.

Neatherlin's rap sheet dates back to 2007, when she was charged with multiple instances of theft and identity theft. Court documents filed by the state describe her as having an "on-going, systematic scheme of doing what she wanted and getting what she wanted, without any concern for the danger she was placing others in."

Damn. She's a criminal who doesn't have an "off" switch. I'm glad that justice finally caught up with her.

It would be nice to imagine that all the women in prison who miss their own kids will make her time very unpleasant... but she sounds so amorally manipulative that shell probably have half the joint conned in a few years.

I dunno. The fact that investigators found out she failed to convince other inmates to lie for her and also failed to convince a former inmate to post bail for her indicates her powers of persuasion don't seem to work on other criminals.

A Bend day care owner who had been accused of slipping children melatonin so that she could hit the gym and go tanning was sentenced to 21 years and four months in prison by a Deschutes County judge Friday.

January Neatherlin, 32, had been running an illegal childcare operation called Little Giggles for approximately four years and pleaded guilty to 11 counts of first-degree criminal mistreatment and one count of third-degree assault, according to court records. She had also lied to parents about being a registered nurse, even though she had no such qualifications.

Super interesting to me is the bit at the end, the court documents saying she had a long term, ongoing systematically run history of doing what she wanted and getting what she wanted regardless of who she hurt.

Since her arrest last March, Neatherlin had approached other inmates and asked them to claim they had worked for her. She also wrote letters to former inmates asking for bail money and promised to pay them from offshore accounts worth "a lot of money," according to the sentencing memo.

part. Even if her plan worked, it still wouldn't because at best she neglected kids and hired convicts.

Unfortunately I let this piece of shit babysit my first child when I moved to Bend about 5 years ago. It only took two days for me to realize something was up. The second day I got my daughter she had a nice set of finger nail wounds in her arm, and not from a child. She tried to blame it on her kid but I wasn’t buying it. So glad I followed my gut instinct and never went back.

A Bend day care owner who had been accused of slipping children melatonin so that she could hit the gym and go tanning was sentenced to 21 years and four months in prison by a Deschutes County judge Friday.

January Neatherlin, 32, had been running an illegal childcare operation called Little Giggles for approximately four years and pleaded guilty to 11 counts of first-degree criminal mistreatment and one count of third-degree assault, according to court records. She had also lied to parents about being a registered nurse, even though she had no such qualifications.

Bend police, based on tips provided by a former boyfriend and a former roommate, surveilled Neatherlin last March and saw her leave the house twice while she was supposed to be watching seven children.

She drove her kids to school on the first trip. On the second, police found her at a local Tan Republic.

The children who had been left in her care during those excursions had the sleep aid melatonin in their systems, according to a sentencing memo.

Neatherlin had been telling parents they couldn't pick up or drop off their kids between 11 a.m. and 2 p.m. Police checked Cross Fit and Tan Republic records to find that's when she would leave the house, hours she referred to as "nap time."

The Bend Bulletin also reports that a child in Neatherlin's care was once sent to a Portland hospital with multiple head injuries and that she admitted to overheating bottle of milk, giving a young child burns.

Since her arrest last March, Neatherlin had approached other inmates and asked them to claim they had worked for her. She also wrote letters to former inmates asking for bail money and promised to pay them from offshore accounts worth "a lot of money," according to the sentencing memo.

Neatherlin's rap sheet dates back to 2007, when she was charged with multiple instances of theft and identity theft. Court documents filed by the state describe her as having an "on-going, systematic scheme of doing what she wanted and getting what she wanted, without any concern for the danger she was placing others in."

The Bend Bulletin also reports that a child in Neatherlin's care was once sent to a Portland hospital with multiple head injuries and that she admitted to overheating bottle of milk, giving a young child burns.

I know the mother of that child who had the head injuries. It's terrifying to think that a daycare center could run for four years under the radar and physically hurt two kids and literally drug dozens more. She's a sociopath plain and simple and I hope she messes up royally in jail and extends her sentence because she's proven to be a danger to others.

I've met her. Yes. The pure definition of a sociopath. "on-going, systematic scheme of doing what she wanted and getting what she wanted, without any concern for the danger she was placing others in." It's right there in the article.

The head injuries alone wouldn't worry me too much depending on the context of how they got the injuries. Kids are clumsy and dumb. You can do everything right and they can still figure out a way to fuck themselves up royally.

My mom actually worked with this lady at a dry cleaners here in Bend, I always heard she was going too hard on alcohol or some other drug. Glad to see she got caught, and glad to see her face jail time for drugging kids and neglecting them. What a fucking business plan.

You've kinda touched on a big sore spot for the same community. They have an almost endless list of child molesters, sex abusers, rapists, and child porn traders, but NONE of them EVER get anything close to this....

Hell the local cops can't even successfully get a rape kit from the hospital to the lab without losing it... So this case must have been SOOO EASY... and they must've really hated her.

Personally I don't think her sentence is disproportionately long, I think the child molesters sentences are disproportionately SHORT. Best example I can give is Jared Fogle. If we ignore his UNGODLY amount of child porn hes getting barely a little over a year each for the victims (that we KNOW of) he personally abused, 15 years for 14 victims. Makes my blood fucking boil.

She is a POS but more importantly..
1] America loves to regulate so much nonsense why the hell was this woman allowed to even OPEN a daycare with her criminal past.
2] It's pathetic that parents are so desperate for affordable child care that they trusted this charlatan.
America needs to stop being concerned about fetuses and worry about what is happening to our children!

The whole regulation thing goes way deeper. It can be very hard to regulate a person who probably never informs family social service agency that they are opening a daycare. Also, single moms or single dad's who work 2-3 jobs who make min wage can sometimes have a hard time finding childcare providers. It not cut and dry..

As a former addict recovering from heavy melatonin abuse... no, not really... Anyone whose actually taken melatonin and knows anything about it is probably wondering wtf? Yeah they are children and all, it's obvious neglect to leave your post, but drugging? That's like giving a child vitamin c and calling it "drugging" it.

Vitamin C....is a vitamin, a water soluble one, which makes it essential and very forgiving of overdosing. While melatonin is relatively benign, it's still a hormone, one kids/people don't need at all; Much less in large or regular doses administered by someone not qualified to even babysit.

Having a babysitter give unnecessary hormones to children, no matter how benign, is fucked up. The fact that she did it specifically to abandon her job for recreational activities makes it that much worse. The fact that she did both of those things while-after committing fraud also doesn't help matters.

It does seem a little absurd given it's a natural chemical we make buuuut taking too much melatonin can actually fuck up your internal production of it and have other health effects. I highly doubt she used proper dosages especially considering it's advised not to give it to children without consulting a doctor first.